The Hero as Businessman

CASH McCALL (444 pp.)--Cameron Hawley--Houghfon Mifflin ($3.95).

THE GIANT'S HOUSE (437 pp.)--Frederick Laing--Dial ($3.95).

These two novels seesaw between a love of business and the business of love, and both writers make big business a good deal more fascinating than love.

Cameron Hawley (Executive Suite) has fashioned the better book around an up-to-the-minute brand of millionaire. Cash McCall is a jut-jawed dynamo who buys depressed companies cheap, jacks them up into profitable operation and sells them dear. Men who do not know him hate him and call him nasty names, e.g., "operator," "raider," "wrecker."

Sour Grapevine. In his $1,000-a-month hotel suite, Cash can afford to be philosophical about what the sour grapevine calls him. "We have a peculiar national attitude toward money-making," he tells an acquaintance. "We maintain that the very foundation of our way of life is what we call free enterprise--the profit system --but when one of our citizens shows enough free enterprise to pile up a little of that profit, we do our best to make him feel . . . ashamed of himself."

The enterprising hero of Cash McCall finds himself in just the situation he describes, while picking up a small, family-owned plastics outfit called Suffolk Moulding. Suffolk is put on the auction block in a panic by its President Grant Austen when he fears he is about to lose a vital contract. Cash offers Austen $2,000,000, and a handshake clinches the deal. Cash is soon clinching with Grant's lissome daughter Lory in a losing proxy fight for his heart.

In Lory's adoring eyes Cash is something of a Neo-Renaissance prince of a man. He flies his own remodeled B26, made his first million before he was 30, and can discuss equally knowledgeably the merits of Italian ham or the life of Buddha. However, when Grant Austen learns that he panicked too soon on Suffolk Moulding, and that McCall is about to unload the company at a $1,000,000 profit, he sees Cash only as a king-size heel. Before the gold dust settles. Cash gets a chance to prove his good faith, and does.

As a former executive of Armstrong

Cork, Author Hawley has a knowing way with business lingo. While Cash and Lory's vapid love scenes tax patience as well as belief, the vitality of Cash McCall rests in its forceful portrait of a venture capitalist who is as remote from a backslapping booster as Reinhold Niebuhr is from Norman Vincent Peale.

Gouge-as-Gouge-Can. The Giant's House is an old-fashioned gouge-as-gouge-can story of business success. An immigrant boy from Ireland, John Horgan has clobbered his way to the top of a chain of supermarkets. Brutal, foulmouthed, yet strangely charming in his roguish, broguish way, he keeps his junior executives underpaid and forever conscious that they must undersell the rival A & P. Horgan's law is that "you never know where bottom is until you probe for it." In one hilariously horrible probing match with Horgan Co., a pudgy little enamelware dealer seems lucky to leave with his ribs, let alone his shirt.

Ailing and aging, John Horgan casts about for an heir apparent and lays his heavy hand of approval on Paul Marrow, his bright, personable sales-promotion manager. At the last moment, Paul decides he would rather write his own news paper column and spend quiet evenings at home with a blonde than be the big knife in a stiletto gang. Before his novel peters out in this implausible way, Author Laing shows enough savvy about supermarkets to have been born and bred in one. Though it is fuller of outmoded caricatures than characterizations, The Giant's House does capture one last tycoon going his dinosaury way.

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